Legendary Filmmaker James Ivory on Call Me by Your Name, the Year’s Most Talked-About Movie

It's not every day (or even every year) that the screenwriter of one of the year's most talked about films is also the creative force behind the revival of a 50-year-old masterpiece. But James Ivory—half of the duo behind the legendary Merchant Ivory productions—has always been unusual.

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The revival is Shakespeare Wallah, a black-and-white masterpiece starring Felicity Kendal and Madhur Jaffrey, about a traveling theater company in India, and one of Ivory's earliest films. Ivory is also the screenwriter of Call Me by Your Name, a 1980s love story starring Armie Hammer, that has been a hit on the film festival circuit all year and is going into wide release later this month with serious awards-season buzz.

Over the course of his long and storied career, Ivory has made dozens of unforgettable films, including Remains of the Day, A Room with a View, and Maurice, and from the first frames of Shakespeare Wallah to the final moments of Call Me, what comes across in everything he does is an unerring attention to detail and unparalleled devotion to storytelling. Here, T&C chats with Ivory to celebrate one of his first movies (back on the big screening November 10 at New York’s Quad Cinema) and to preview his latest.

Shakespeare Wallah first came out in 1966 and is this month being rereleased into theaters. How do you feel about revisiting something that you worked on so long ago?

I’m very pleased. Any director would be pleased that you made a film 50 years ago and someone still wants to see it. And then there are those that were made more recently, like Howard’s End and Maurice; Heat and Dust has come also out again. I’m happy, of course.

Madhur Jaffrey in Shakespeare Wallah.

Courtesy of the Cohen Film Collection

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You’ve directed 35 films, are you ever surprised by the ones that find a second life? Do people tend to come back to the titles you would expect?

There are films there that they’re going to bring out I think eventually, that didn’t do all that well in the box office and—but which I think are really some of the best things we ever made. I don’t know whether the films that they’re going to bring out in the future will be of that great interest to people now, but I’m be curious to see. There are certain films that we made that I liked very much, but they just disappeared quickly and were never seen again. And I’ll be interested to know whether a new generation likes them, and accepts them, and watches them, or not. So, we’ll see.

In October, the city of Florence bestowed upon you its highest civilian honor, the Fiorino d'Oro, during a 30th anniversary celebration for A Room with A View. This is an exceptionally celebrated year for you, isn’t it?

A Room with A View really has become part of Italian culture; it’s no longer an English film.

That was a lot of fun, it was wonderful. That film really has become part of Italian culture; it’s no longer an English film, doesn’t have English identity anymore. Where the Italians are concerned, it’s their film. It’s called Camera con vista and they know all about it, and they love it, and it’s theirs. It was fascinating to see how people received that film and what it meant to them.

Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands in 1985’s A Room with a View

Getty Images

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But it’s not all just looking back. This month, Call Me by Your Name, which you adapted from the novel, is coming out after a few months of big-deal festival buzz. How did you get involved?

It was almost accidental thing. The people who own the screen rights are my neighbors here in upstate New York in Columbia, and they had tried over several years to get it going and asked me whether I would be the executive producer on it. I said, "sure." I had read the book, I liked it very much. Then, eventually, when they got Luca Guadagnino to direct it, I think it was his idea that I direct it with him. And at that point, I said, "Well, I’d like to do that, it’ll be fun, I’ve never directed with anybody before, but why not? I can do it." And the only thing was, I said I wanted to write my own screenplay. I wanted to have a screenplay that I liked and I didn’t have to doctor somebody else’s, and I’d just write it from scratch, and that’s what happened.

Eventually, it was decided that—basically by the financier—that it would be a bit unwieldy to have two directors, it might slow everything down. And that’s true, it might have. And so, I withdrew, but it’s my screenplay that the production was based on that, and that’s how it was.

Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name.

Photo by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

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Is making a movie today different for you than it was 50 years ago?

I don’t think so. You have the same concerns, you want to get out whatever it is you wrote and you believe about the story, and it’s important to you. You work very hard to make sure that that’s there—particularly if you’re adapting a book, you want the tone of that book to be the tone of the film. I mean, you want the author’s tone, but hear your own voice as well.

The big difference is of course when I did Shakespeare Wallah, we had a creative team, a group of us, and we were a filmmaking entity, and we worked together for many, many, many years doing—not always the same people but usually the same writer and producer, and we worked together for a long, long time. Now there’s no team anymore. I’m alone now and working on my own.

It seems like Call Me is going to keep you pretty busy during awards season, but what’s next for you?

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, I think I’m going to write a screenplay for another novel that I read recently that interests me. And I have a long-term project which I have not been able to bring about; for years, been trying to make a film from Shakespeare’s Richard II and I’ve never been able to—I’m not giving up, but it’s not an easy sell.

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